Will the gas tax help Obama?

Jon Chait makes the counterintuitive argument that Barack Obama's refusal to pander on the summer gas tax holiday will actually help him, but I think he omits a key factor: Obama will be proved right if a holiday is enacted and prices at the pump don't fall much or at all this summer. (It might be true that prices would have be a bit higher in the absence of the gas tax holiday, but people have a hard time with counterfactuals.)

In the main political science model of presidential pandering, one of the key variables is whether the policy will be revealed as having succeeded or failed before the election. The finding is that presidents will only pander to public opinion when they are marginally popular and believe the public is unlikely to find out about the policy's success until after the election.

In that framework, Clinton's position makes perfect sense -- the Democratic primary contest will be over before the failure of the gas tax holiday would become clear -- but McCain's position seems irrational. It only makes sense if he believes (a) Congress won't pass a gas tax holiday and/or (b) the public won't be able to tell if it succeeds or fails.

Comments

[bg]

Conventional wisdom says there's zero chance of Congress passing a gas tax holiday.

[Jinchi]

Clinton's stand feeds into the perception that she'll say anything to get elected. Obama's reinforces the idea that he's a different kind of politician.

That's a net plus for Obama regardless of what the main political science model says.